Refreshingly, she is also skeptical of the professional public crusader, and puts the interest groups behind the Alar scare in their place. This is fitting, because many of the big, scary, and worth less numbers circulating in the public information economy come from such do-gooders, and often go unquestioned because of their seemingly blameless sources.
Examples include the oft-repeated number from cancer interest groups that American women face a one-in-eight chance of contracting breast cancer, a figure that applies only to women who have already managed to live to be 95. That failure of intention also rubs up against a failure of aggregation: Those figures are based on the assumption that we even know for certain how many people have breast cancer, which we don't; any data collection on cancer rates could easily be missing something. As two journalists who write about cancer admitted in The Nation, "Not only is there no central national agency to report cancer cases to ...but there is no uniform way that cases are reported, no one specialist responsible for reporting the case." Another example is inflated figures on the number of homeless in America, spread by activist Mitch Snyder and repeated breathlessly throughout the '80s. Those figures, because of their sensitive political connotation, have been thor oughly debunked, usually by journalists with an ideological interest in doing so.
Crossen's tone is sometimes too somber and self-important. As Mencken put it, a good horse laugh is often worth a hundred syllogisms. Much of the number nonsense Crossen writes about deserves derision, not mopingfor example, the numerical fakeries of cola taste tests were, believe it or not, once the subject of government fraud investigators in Massachusetts.
She is on target with some of her explanations of possible polling biases that make the many, many polls that fill newspapers of questionable value. A good example: If you ask someone a question that is calculated to raise negative feelings about the current national situation, you can appar ently influence how they'll say they feel about the incumbent in the next question.
This could imply two things: Either people make their voting decisions based on the last thing that entered their head before they entered the polling booth, in which case the voting public is so stupid that who cares about polling biasor that polls are completely artificial ways to get informa tion about people's actual voting behavior, in which case who cares about polls?
Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and expert on the failures of communism, is even more portentous than Crossen in his The Tyranny of Numbers . Eberstadt concentrates on failures of aggregation and failures of analysis; often the problem with the way people use numbers to reach conclusions is that they aren't using the right numbers. In his introduction, Eberstadt thunders: "[M]odern man lives under a tyranny of numbers...ordinary people around the world routinely suffer injury through the agency of...dull statistics. On more than a few occasions, these injuries have been grave and irreversible and have afflicted large numbers of persons." An example: misleading data about world hunger that prompt further state control of food distribution, with ill effects.
But Eberstadt is something of a number tyrant himself. His profession as demographer requires him to pay obeisance to macroaggregates. Sometimes he is sensitive to the problems of data gathering, and warns the readers to be wary of certain numbers (even as he uses them to make points) because of doubts about how they were gathered. He points out that communist and Third World nations have often lacked the capability or will to accumulate honest data about the states of their nations.
But he rarely snorts at numbers, and the non-technical reader is given no help in judging how much salt to chew with the data that Eberstadt does present as gospel. Am I to take it on faith that the U.S. Census Bureau can calculate with trustworthy accuracy the life expectancy of the Chinese people from the 1950s to the present? Or that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is quite certain about trends in cigarette consumption in Eastern Europe? It's not impossible, I suppose, but doesn't anyone wonder about how such allegedly reliable figures are gathered?
But you know what? I wondered, but I didn't check. This is a deeper hazard of the cult of numbers. Whether numbers are the declarations of interest groups, the results of science papers, or the macroaggregates of governments, hardly anyone checks them. Burgess's anecdote chips away at the sturdy reliance the Eberstadts of the world place on huge data collections, as do more recent media reports. Celia Farber has reported in Spin about how numbers on African AIDS are often manufactured from whole cloth. Michael Maren has done the same in the pages of Forbes MediaCritic about deaths from the war and famine in Somalia. Crossen quotes a figure bruited about by Bill Clinton on the number of lobbyists in Washington that its ostensible source, a professor, admits to deriving "off the top of my head."
But beyond data collection problems lie deeper, conceptual problems: Even if the numbers could be trusted, so what? One of the central points of Eberstadt's early chapters is that counts of poverty in the United States count the wrong thing. They overemphasize income when they ought to look at consumption, as well as such secondary measures as health, nutrition, and infant mortality.
Reuven Brenner's curious book gives an iconoclastic answer to the "so what?" question: It makes no difference how "good" the numbers are when discussing economics and national prosperity; they're still best ignored. As Brenner wends his way through his often difficult book (dedicated to explaining his vision of the key to the wealth of nations), he keeps coming back to the point that economic macroaggregatesbothering to collect them or using them to make decisionsare always in error. He emphasizes the data collection errors inherent in key macroeconomic variables such as the consumer price index and gross national product. "Price indices give a distorted view of changes in price levels when many new products come on the market, or when there are yearly, drastic changes in the performance of computers, VCRs, and other communication and home entertainment equipment, as well as in people's expenditures on them." Besides, for most of us it is relative indi vidual prices that are important in our decision-making, not some phantom national price level.
Brenner quotes a Bureau of Labor Statistics official admitting that estimating productivity "is just about impossible." He points out that figures on savings and investment run into inherent objectivity problems, since certain purchases some might see as consumptionsay, a home computer or a housecould be made as investments, and thus perhaps ought to count as savings. There is an inherent subjectivity at the heart of all economic decisions that makes objective macroaggregations in economics difficult if not impossible. Thus, Brenner thinks that even if the technical problems he discusses in GNP, productivity figures, and price indices could be solved with better and more elaborate surveying techniques, who cares?
"There cannot be," Brenner writes, "any such thing as a 'general theory' about any of the following questions: How does the general level of a government's expenditures, in particular its debts and deficits, affect either the total production of goods and services, or the national income earned from production? How do the debt and deficit affect employment? How do the debt and deficits affect the allocation of resources between current consumption and investment? The reason that no general answers can be given to any of these questions is simple....It all depends on what the government does with the money and on the timing of its expenditures." Obsessed with the big number, Brenner argues, we ignore the fact that any given element of these huge aggregations is individual, and can't be assumed to have the same effect as any other element in the aggregation. So talk of the aggregation's effects is meaningless.
All of the error and confusion Crossen, Eberstadt, and Brenner discuss come down to us at the retail end of the information economy in daily newspaper or TV news report, so the buck, in a sense, stops there. Various researchers do occasionally make hay out of tracing faulty numbers back to their sources, as Christina Sommers did with the claims of feminist interest groups in her book Who Stole Feminism? But that kind of story is hard to write, and it's naive to make suggestions about changing the practice of journalism, as Crossen does in the recommendations at the end of her book, that depend on effort and scrupulousness that can't always be expected.
Sure, reporters pride themselves on a withering skepticism. "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out," snarls the stereotypical grizzled city editor. But sociologist Richard Gelles, quoted in Newsweek, is more in line with the everyday practice of journalism: "Reporters don't ask, 'How do you know it?' They're on deadline. They just want the figures so they can go back to their word processors." Whenever I read a newspaper article about something I have firsthand knowledge of, I inevitably find at least one mistake. Conversations with others tell me this is almost universal.
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